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(Note: The following article is a compilation of papers written at the request of two Native American groups exploring the pros and cons of gambling, in terms of spirituality. The article is based on the book, Gambler Way, and was not written to endorse either side of the issue. Please use proper credits when quoting and please notify me of any uses. You may scroll through the article or use the hyperlinks to subtopics.) Topics:
When it comes to gambling on reservations, there are generally two camps. Proponents believe that reservation casinos are conducive to self-sufficiency and autonomy, while opponents believe that gambling is destructive to the socio-economic fabric of a community, not to mention what it does to the individual. Gambling proponents are criticized for their immorality, but they themselves will argue that economics and spirituality are separate issues, and that the real issue is power. The gambling controversy appears to be a conundrum, but as a wise man once said, "Truth is what the opposites have in common," and the middle ground in this case is indeed spirituality. The dominant religions of the world judge gambling on a moral basis, claiming that it has secular origins. But not too long ago, gambling on many reservations was intricately connected with religious rites and festivals and, in fact, such sacred gambling also lies at the root of Western religious development. Although it may seem to be a contradiction in terms, gambling is as spiritual as praying. Both activities seek divine affirmation and reversal of fortune. Return 
These pieces from the Ojibwa/Chippewa game, "bowl and counters" (Pugasaing), are described in a gambling sequence in Longfellow's Hiawatha. Top row, ducks; 2nd row, brass dice; 3rd, water serpent, war club, earth serpent; 4th, Ininewug (men) and fish. Drawn by Schoolcraft, 1848. No historical period or culture on the globe lacks the means for gambling, and it was often associated with death and rebirth. One Egyptian tomb-painting (c. 3500 BCE) depicts a nobleman in his after—life playing a dice board game of hounds and jackals. A Sumerian board game was found in a royal cemetery dated to circa 2600 BCE. Antelope ankle bones, presumed to have been used as dice, are often found in prehistoric tombs and burial caves around the world, perhaps for afterlife recreation, or so the dead could "re-create" life. Icelandic and Hindu mythology mirror many Native American myths that claim that the gods destroy and recreate the world on a diceboard. Playing boards or fields are themselves altars of the sacred. Johan Huizinga, author of Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture, said that magicians, priests, and gamblers all begin their work by circumscribing the consecrated spot. There is no distinction between marking out a space for a sacred purpose and marking it out for purposes of sheer play. The turf, the tennis court, the chessboard, and the pavement hopscotch cannot formally be distinguished from the temple or the magic circle. Game diagrams were built into roofing slabs of a temple in ancient Thebes, carved into the cloister seats of medieval English churches, and pecked into survey markers for the grid underlying the pyramid city of Teotihuacán. Return Which Came First, Gambling or Gameplaying? It is difficult to prove which came first, gameplaying or gambling. Far back in prehistory, idle humans began carving and painting bits of bone, shell, stick, arrow, or halved reed, inventing a little game around the number of two-sided dice falling solid-side, black-side, or convex-side up. The binary quality of these pieces began to be associated with "yes" or "no." Before long, players attempted to appropriate the future by risking something of value against it.  Zuñi Dice |
| The ancients
might have noticed a pattern to winning and losing, that certain
rituals seemed to affect this pattern. From this, players may have
surmised that some invisible force controlled the outcome of the
game. This same force, perhaps, also controlled the weather, famine,
fertility, or the celestial bodies. They personified the forces
as superdeities and gambled to control or appease them.
Return
Gods Consulted through Gaming Pieces In some parts of the globe, the gambling pieces were associated with the gods and were consulted for advice. In ancient Chinese temples, for example, the patterns made by a handful of tossed reeds corresponded to the intricate diagrams of yin and yang in the I Ching. From Greek historians we know that Zeus and Aphrodite, among others, were consulted with the toss of dice, and the Iliad describes how the Olympian gods were beseeched in lotteries held by soldiers to select a battle champion. Return Biblical References to the Casting of Lots The Bible also tells us how a pair of stone dice were used to determine the will of God. In Isaiah (34:17), for instance, dice were cast in order to determine land allotments given to each family to pass on from one generation to the next. The word "lot" refers to a portion of something, or to someone's destiny, and translators of the Bible may have substituted the familiar word for the more obscure biblical terms, Urim and Thummim. What the Urim and Thummim were and how they were used remains lost to antiquity. Scholars speculate that they were the names of two divining stones employed by priests in an unknown fashion as a channel for the will of God—one stating the affirmative and the other the negative. In Exodus (28:30), for example, God tells Moses that whenever Aaron comes into His presence in holy places, he must carry the Urim and Thummim in his breastpiece (ephod) engraved with the names of the tribes of Israel. In so doing God would always remember His people, and Aaron could determine His will for Israel. F. N. David, in his 1962 book Gambling, Gods and Games, suggested that gambling was a development of the board game, where the random element of chance was retained and the board dispensed with. "It is, however, equally likely that gaming developed from the wager and the wager from the drawing of lots, the interrogation of the oracles, and so on, which have their roots deep in religious ritual." Gambling, then, was originally entangled in the rudimentary forms of spirituality. Return Early American Attitudes Toward Gambling Although early explorers to America expressed disapproval of the indigenous population for its gambling obsessions and associated "heathen practices," games of hazard were rampant in the New World. Lotteries were critical to funding the colonization of America, the Revolutionary War, and even such universities as Harvard and Princeton. Southerners wagered slaves, plantations, and fortunes at horse racing, cribbage, cards, and dominoes. New Englanders were split: Some aligned with the British economist Sir William Petty, who called gambling a "tax upon unfortunate self-conceited fools." Others quoted the casting of lots in the Bible as sanction for their backroom betting. The moral judgment of gambling as a sin in Western thinking might have begun in Roman times when citizens bet future wages, homes, wives, and children at the gaming tables, prompting legislators to establish antigambling laws. Throughout the Dark Ages the Church vigorously and unsuccessfully blasted against gaming as a vice, or because it was too closely woven to the gods of the pagan religions. Sir Petty in the seventeenth century argued that the Sovereign should guard "gamblers, lunatics, and idiots" from their own worst instincts. That's when Pascal and colleagues worked out the mathematical probability of the fall of the dice. The theory of probability promoted a new confidence in gamblers, as if reason could override chance, of particular interest to insurance underwriters. Thus, gambling and spirituality were forever severed in Western thought. Gambling, across the board, was originally considered to be a means by which devotees could contact the deities, with one overriding exception in approach: gamblers in the Old World cast lots to divine the will of the gods and to forecast the future, while Native Americans played gambling games to come into harmony with their universe. In his 1901 report for the Bureau of American Ethnology, entitled Games of the North American Indians, Stewart Culin concluded, "In general, games appear to be played ceremonially, as pleasing to the gods, with the object of securing fertility, causing rain, giving and prolonging life, expelling demons, or curing sickness." Return Gambling Prevalent in New World A Thousand Years Before European Contact By the very fact that Congress had to separately classify and define traditional ritual gambling as Class One under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act demonstrates how prevalent it is among tribal nations. It is safe to assume that gaming existed in this hemisphere at least a thousand years before European contact, as witnessed in the Hohokam and Mesoamerican ballcourts, the bone dice in Anasazi great houses in the Southwest, and the stone discs and playing fields of the Eastern Woodland Mound Builders. Ethnological records dating as far back as the fifteenth century testify to widespread gambling across the continent as a means of earning a living, far less expensive than raiding and warfare. In those days, economics and spirituality weren't considered separate issues. Culin gathered gaming information from 229 North American and Mexican tribes, identifying thirty-six different kinds of games of chance and dexterity, which were played-with side bets, at fixed times of the year during festivals and religious rites. Return  Aztec Game of Patolli (Codex Florentine) Gambling a Means for Revitalizing Southwestern, Mexican, and Plains Tribes Among Southwestern and Mexican tribes, gaming rituals were performed to assist the change of seasons from winter to summer and back or, as in the moccasin game, to divide the day between light and darkness. In short, the act of ceremonial gambling symbolized the continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This theme was carried over into the American Great Plains, where the Pawnee hand game and attending gambling myths synchronized the movements of that tribe with the movements of the sun, moon, and morning star. The hand game was also played as a rite of spring before a hunt or to drive a rival tribe into economic ruin. When the Pawnees became nearly depopulated along with the buffalo early in this century, the secrets of their religion became nearly extinct, and so they turned to the Ghost Dance to revive the culture. When the American government outlawed the Ghost Dance, the Pawnees blended parts of the dance with the old hand game ceremony. The converted Ghost Dance hand game was played to ensure reunion with the ancestors and the buffalo in an afterlife that included no white people. In short, gaming was considered to be a means of revitalizing the tribe, not unlike it is on many reservations today. Return Gambling Considered Taboo Among Navajos This is not to say that all tribes or individual tribal members favor gambling on their reservations, and some will go so far as to say it is taboo. Indeed, historical documents report that gambling had its devastating effects. Culin's study included numerous accounts by early chroniclers who observed, sometimes in shock and moral indignation, the intensity and obsession to which players gambled away their high stakes with dreadful consequences to the losers. Anthropologist James Mooney, who recorded a lengthy Cherokee gambler myth, said he had seen "groups of men and women wager their ornaments and all their personal goods, even to their articles of clothing, until their bodies were nude." The governor of the Washington Territory reported that tribes of the upper Missouri devoted all their leisure time, both day and night, to gambling, to the distress and poverty of their families. There were several cases in which the loser, having bet and lost everything, went home and shot himself, and another case in which a man was murdered for refusing to stake his wife after already winning everything. These are still serious concerns on and off reservations today. Return Ritual Gambling Brings Harmony to Cosmos in a Hundred Myths Surveyed A survey of more than a hundred gambling myths originating from the Subarctic igloos to the ballcourts of the Quiché Maya reveals the extent to which gambling played a metaphoric role in Native spiritual thought and beliefs. All of these are thoroughly explored region by region in my book, Gambler Way: Indian Gaming in Mythology, History, and Archaeology in North America (Johnson Books, 1996). The primary message appears to be that gambling, within a traditional context for such purposes as weather control, bringing back the sun, the plants, the buffalo, or the health of an individual or group was sanctioned, but that gambling outside of this context was dangerous for the well-being of the gambler as well as the community and the cosmos. For instance, in gaming mythology, when humans go up against the superbeings, the stakes include all of one's possessions, slavery, arms, legs, eyes, and heads—often in that order. Whole tribes and worlds are often destroyed and it is up to the hero gambler to restore them. The following Paviotso myth demonstrates the point: Paviotso Myth While hunting one day, a boy is told by a little bird that Centipede has killed all of his people through gambling, cut out and dried their hearts, and strung up all their hands together, burning the rest of their bodies. The bird instructs the youth in how to beat the gambler. With the help of owl and gopher, the youth wins. He throws Centipede into the fire and plants the dried hearts in the damp earth. His people are restored on the third sunrise. Return  Hero must guess that this figure is Guard of the Water Jars (rain) in a Navajo myth. Sometimes the gambler myth centers around a youth, who is often the child of such spirits as Sun, Thunder, or Bear. The youth is exiled from the tribe for excessive gambling or for not attending to his spiritual duties. Before defeating the supergambler, the hero must undergo some sort of vision quest or ritual, when he is taught the magic components of gambling by a spirit guide or deity. The following myth told by the Lilliooet of British Columbia illustrates this key point: Lilliooet Myth An old woman tells a bankrupt gambler to go to the mountains and train for four years. At the end of that period, he goes to a lake where, on the other side, are two underground houses; good people live in one house, cannibals in the other. He enters the house of the good people, whereupon the chief readies him for gambling by whipping him four times, washing him, and giving him his two daughters. The gambler then enters the other house, where he stakes his two wives against the two daughters and property of the bad chief, and wins. The gambler returns the property to the bad chief but keeps the daughters as wives. Now he has four women who each bear him a daughter. He returns home and enjoys infamy as a great gambler. When a man asks the gambler his secrets, he sends him directly to the cannibal people. And since this gambler has not prepared himself, he is eaten. ReturnGambling Myth in Ancient Hindu Mahabharata Analogous to the "test theme" gambling myths of the Americas is the ancient Hindu text called the Mahabharata. Two cousins play dice to determine the rightful heir to the throne. The initial loser, Yudhisthira, is the son of Dharma, considered to be the God of Universal Law (cause and effect). Yudhisthira undergoes a thirteen-year sojourn through the forest, during which time he learns volumes of spiritual principles (all of which are in the Mahabharata). Only after he passes certain tests presented by deities can he return to take his rightful place as ruler of the universe. This dharmic action, is analogous to "right gambling" described in the Navajo chantways, where the hero is in exile as a gambling or sexual zealot for a number of years and undergoes intense purification. Return Gambling a Metaphor for Balance in the Continuum, Death, and Rebirth It is a common occurrence for many figures in Native American mythology to play alternate roles as a good gambler or bad. Gambling stories aren't about good versus evil, but that good and evil are part of a continuum that must stay in balance. In fact, the bad gambler isn't always killed, but is whittled down to a more manageable force. On the other hand, after the Navajo Great Gambler is defeated, he is shot into the air where he transfigures from an enemy into a god of a whole new race of people. Nature's continuous flow between birth, death, and rebirth is mimicked in the constant ebb and flow of game playing between two sides. The key to gambling mythology is that gambling universally is a metaphor for both the crucifixion and the resurrection. This is even true in literature, as mouthed by a bankrupt roulette-player in Dostoyevsky's novel, The Gambler: "One turn of the wheel, and everything changes. . . . What am I today? Zéro. What can I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and start to live again!" But be warned: Whatever goes up, must also come down. The spinning wheel of fortune gives the illusion that life is either constantly evolving or devolving. The truth is, it is a never ending cycle. The great spiritual masters of India use the board game of pachisi to illustrate the point that all of life is constantly being shuffled through the revolving door of birth, death, and rebirth. Remember pachisi? We played it as children. Two to four people can play at a time and their positions are marked by four pieces represented by one of four colors. The goal is to move the pieces all around the spaces of the board, as determined by the roll of the dice, until the markers finally reach the kingdom of heaven. In the Puranas mythology of India the dual pair of gods known as Shiva and Shakti create and destroy the worlds through pachisi using humans as pawns and night and day as dice. In a spiritual text of India called the Sar Bachan, the four groups of variant-colored markers are said to represent the four stages of life through which all souls must rotate: vegetation, insect, bird and fish, and mammal. After each form of life is experienced, the soul then revolves through all forms of human experience; the dice of cause and effect determined their "lot" in each experience. In the game of pachisi, each color group has its own "home path" to heaven. Similarly, in the game of life, each soul rushes the gates of heaven by traveling every imaginable path of religious endeavor. Upon death, the soul exits the game through that particular path's version of heaven only to find itself back on the board in a rebirth. Finally after the soul has had millions of chances on the dice board, it meets a Sat Guru or True Master, who escorts the soul off the board, once and for all, and into the imperishable region known as Sach Khand. Here the soul has come into God realization and is, at long last, the god of its own universe where cause and effect are no longer an issue. Gaming was commonly used as a metaphor for spiritual growth. Consider this poem by the 14th century poet Hafiz: What is the differenceConclusion: Gambling Addictions are a Form of Spiritual Seeking What the ancients in both hemispheres seem to be saying is that gamblers, and especially gambling addicts, are, in a manner of speaking, spiritual seekers. As Mooney said, gambling is rooted in the "universal longing of mankind to know the cause of things and how effects may be controlled." In other words, the gambler, unbeknownst to him or herself, is looking for divinity. Sure, on the surface they are seeking economic fortune, but they are also seeking a personal transformation, for that feeling of invincibility and liberation, even if for only in the moment of exhilaration. The moment is indeed transitory, and the seeking of further moments is what can sometimes throw the individual out of integrity, causing addictive cycles. Whatever the forces are that the gambler believes is causing him or her to win or to lose, they can never sustain or nurture the gambler. Of course, these forces do not exist outside of the self, but lie within one's own actions. The Native myths show that the effects can be cataclysmic. Gambling addictions should not be viewed as inherently evil or immoral, but as a disease of the spirit that uses pleasure to avoid pain. It is not that they are weaker than most, for we are all caught in the cycle of pleasure and pain, but that their pain is more acute and their search for spirituality more urgent. In many eastern philosophies, this dilemma is known as divine discontent, and as the native gambling myths show, such malaise is a necessary step in the process of becoming spiritual. Society can try to exile or reform addictive gamblers but, ultimately, they must embark on their own vision quest that takes them deeper into their traditional beliefs, and beyond. This is not to say that gamblers should not suffer the consequences of their actions for, afterall, these are part of the experiment to "know the cause of things and how effects can be controlled." The book, Gambler Way, is out of print, but I have a few copies for $36.00, plus shipping and handling. Contact the author for your signed copy. Or check out amazon.com for used copies and credit card options. |
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